Entertainment

Find Exactly What You Want to Watch With Moreflicks

Michael Rothman is an entertainment veteran with experience covering music, movies and TV for AOL, Hollywood.com and US Magazine. But his love for cinema dates back to his youth growing up in South Florida, absolutely glued to the television. He’s currently in New York to pursue his Master’s in Journalism with Studio 20 at NYU.

Kay Featherstone was like most people: after work she wanted to curl up with dinner and a movie on the couch. Her medium of choice is usually Netflix.

After spending two hours one night trying to find something to watch, Featherstone had enough.

“Statistics show people spend just as much time searching for the film as they do watching it,” said Featherstone, a UK resident, who finds it harder to discover Netflix movies because different areas of the world get different titles.

She said due to content deals, the UK gets about a quarter of the almost 200,000 titles Netflix has for the U.S.

“Canadians have the biggest beef with Netflix,” she said. “They live only a few miles away but have a completely different catalogue, even smaller than the UK.”

Enter Moreflicks — a site that not only helps out the average international movie and TV fan by letting them know what’s available in their area, but also combines all the powerhouse outlets into one search engine. In addition to Netflix, the site offers programs from Hulu, Crackle and Vudu, with more coming.

There are already exterior search sites out there like Instantwatcher.com, but that only scours Netflix, Featherstone says.

Through Moreflicks, a fan catching up on a show like Vampire Diaries can stream the old seasons through Netflix, catch the latest episodes on Hulu and pay for ones in between through a service like Vudu, iTunes, or Amazon without having to go to three different websites.

The self-funded site also brings in ratings, reviews and suggestions from Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix and IMDB all rolled into one, not just the basic Netflix suggestions that pop up based on what was previously watched.

Moreflicks is based in Toronto and equipped with three programmers working with Featherstone in the UK. With the idea hatched last summer and the site launched in December, Featherstone admits the site of far from perfect (she used the word "shit" to describe it at launch) and needs a lot of work.

Redditor Focus Group

“Reddit is like a modern focus group,” Featherstone says. “Reddit’s a great site to see what people are talking about and is better than Twitter because people are actually having conversations, not having their tweets disappear into oblivion.”

In fact, the first day she posted a link to the site on a subreddit, the Moreflicks server crashed with more than 500,000 page views.

Featherstone said unlike companies asking for advice just to appease the audience, Moreflicks has incorporated the best and most common Reddit suggestions like taking the site mobile and adding Amazon or iTunes to the site’s movie outlets.

“We found out through Reddit that when people are searching for a movie, they are not likely to be in front of a computer. They want mobile. That’s the number one suggestion for our site,” she said.

She admits that some Reddit users were pretty damming when first checking out the site, but she welcomed all criticism. “We also had web designers and software security experts offering their services to us through Reddit,” she says.

Using Reddit suggestions, the site is just now starting to be recoded and “hopefully” will be ready for relaunch in about a month, Featherstone added.

With Reddit’s help once again, Moreflicks hopes to produce a user interface that is friendly, attractive and, most importantly, usable. After which, it will definitely end up on Reddit once again.

“Feedback is so integral to everything we are doing,” she said. “It must be usable. What’s the point of making something if people hate it?”

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